MONDAY, 1 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Fiction," by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press).
Fiction
The people in the elevator all
Face front, they all keep still, they all
Look up with the rapt and stupid look of saints
In paintings at the numbers that light up
By turn and turn to tell them where they are.
They are doing the dance, they are playing the game.
To get here they have gone by avenue
And street, by ordinate and abscissa, and now
By this new coordinate, up. They are three-
dimensional characters, taken from real life;
They have their fates, whether to rise or fall,
And when their numbers come up they get out.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Invisible Man, Ralph Waldo Ellison, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (1914). He played cornet in high school and wanted to become a classical musician. He decided to study music at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but he didn't have enough money to pay for the train fare, so he hitched his way there on freight trains. On the way, he passed through Decatur, Alabama, where the Scottsboro trial was underway, in which several young black men were accused of raping a white woman. Ellison was almost arrested for being a black man riding the freight trains, and the experience made a deep impression on him.
Ellison went to New York after his first year at the music institute, hoping to make enough money to pay for his second year. It was here that he met the great African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. They encouraged him to write stories and book reviews for New York magazines, and Ellison decided to quit studying music and devote his life to writing.
One day, he was sitting in a barn on his friend's farm in Vermont, staring at a typewriter, when he typed the sentence, "I am an invisible man." He didn't know where it came from, but he wanted to pursue the idea, to find out what kind of a person would think of himself as invisible. The sentence turned into his first novel, Invisible Man, published in 1952. It tells the life story of a disillusioned African-American man who has gone through a series of misadventures. Ellison wrote in Invisible Man: "I am an invisible man. . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
He spent the last forty years of his life working on his second novel, but he never finished it. In 1967, more than 300 pages of the manuscript were accidentally destroyed in a fire, but Ellison continued working on it. When he died in 1994, he left behind about 1,500 pages of the novel. The story spanned almost 150 years, and there were three plotlines and more than a dozen narrators. Ellison scholar John F. Callahan whittled down the manuscript to about 900 pages and published it in 1999 under the title Juneteenth. The novel covers much of African-American history in the twentieth century, and focuses on the story of a U.S. senator who was raised as a light-skinned black in rural Georgia. Juneteenth became a national bestseller.
It's the birthday of poet Howard Nemerov, born in New York City (1920). His Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. He's also written several novels, including The Melodramatists (1947) and The Homecoming Game (1957). He grew up in New York City, went to Harvard, fought in World War II, and spent almost the rest of his life teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. He once said he liked teaching because he could do all of his explaining in class, and that allowed him to write poetry with no explanations.
He started writing poetry after studying T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats in college. He later said, "I got . . . the idea that what you were supposed to do was be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times, but civilization has ended so many times during my brief term on earth that I got a little bored with the theme, and in old age I concluded that the model was really Mother Goose."
It's the birthday of poet Robert Lowell, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1917). He was born into a prominent New England family, attended private schools and later went to Harvard. In his second year at Harvard, he met the poet Allen Tate and began writing poetry. In the summer of 1937, he camped out in Tate's yard in Tennessee, studying literature and writing poetry. In the fall, he transferred to Kenyon College in Ohio to study with Tate's mentor, John Crowe Ransom.
After the U.S. began firebombing German cities like Dresden, Lowell became a conscientious objector to World War II. He spent six months in jail, and several more months performing community service. It was while he was serving his sentence that he finished his first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness (1944). A year later, he published a revised version called Lord Weary's Castle (1946), and it won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize.
He spent the 1950s in and out of mental institutions for severe depression. The poet Anne Sexton wrote to Lowell, "I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane." Lowell's psychiatrists encouraged him to write about his childhood, and in 1959 he came out with Life Studies, a book of poems about his own life written in a much looser meter than his earlier poems. It was the beginning of a new kind of American poetry that came to be called "confessional." Lowell's Collected Poems were published last year.
Lowell said, "If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon."
It's the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur, born in New York City (1921). He's the author of several collections, including Advice to a Prophet (1961); Walking to Sleep (1969); and his latest, Mayflies (2000). He grew up on a farm in New Jersey, went to Amherst, and spent summers riding trains across the country, living like a hobo. He started writing poetry during World War II, as a way to give order to all of the chaos he saw around him. His first book of poetry, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, came out in 1947. Ten years later he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Things of This World (1956). He was the United States poet laureate from 1987 to 1988.
TUESDAY, 2 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Digging for China," by Richard Wilbur, from The Poems of Richard Wilbur (Harvest).
Digging for China
"Far enough down is China," somebody said.
"Dig deep enough and you might see the sky
As clear as at the bottom of a well.
Except it would be real--a different sky.
Then you could burrow down until you came
To China! Oh, it's nothing like New Jersey.
There's people, trees, and houses, and all that,
But much, much different. Nothing looks the same."
I went and got the trowel out of the shed
And sweated like a coolie all that morning,
Digging a hole beside the licac-bush,
Down on my hands and knees. It was a sort
Of praying, I suspect. I watched my hand
Dig deep and darker, and I tried and tried
To dream a place where nothing was the same.
The trowel never did break through to blue.
Before the dream could weary of itself
My eyes were tired of looking into darkness,
My sunbaked head of hanging down a hole.
I stood up in a place I had forgotten,
Blinking and staggering while the earth went round
And showed me silver barns, the fields dozing
In palls of brightness, patens growing and gone
In the tides of leaves, and the whole sky china blue.
Until I got my balance back again
All that I saw was China, China, China.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Tom Wolfe, born in Richmond, Virginia (1930). He's best known as the author of the novels Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998), as well as the nonfiction books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and The Right Stuff (1979). His father was an agricultural scientist who also edited an agricultural magazine called the Southern Planter. Wolfe wrote, "As far as I was concerned, my father was a man who sat at his desk writing with a pencil on a yellow legal pad. Two weeks later his not terribly legible handwriting would reappear as smartly turned out regiments of black type on graphically beautiful pages for thousands of people to read. To me that was magic, and my father was a writer."
Growing up, he wanted to become a professional baseball player. He was a star pitcher for his high school and college teams, and he played for two seasons in an amateur league. He quit baseball after he was rejected at a tryout for the New York Giants. He began his writing career in the late 1950s as a journalist for newspapers in New York City and Washington, D.C., and for magazines such as New York and Esquire. He was one of the first writers of "New Journalism"—a style of nonfiction that borrowed creative techniques from fiction and often included the journalist as a character in the story. Many of his essays, on topics including stock-car racing, contemporary art, and the psychedelic movement of the '60s, were published in the collections The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and The Pump House Gang (1968).
In 1981, Wolfe started doing research about ambitious professionals in New York City. He was planning on writing a nonfiction book, but he decided to turn it into a novel, and it became The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). It was first published in serial form in Rolling Stone magazine, and when it came out as a novel it became a huge bestseller. Wolfe said, "People are always writing about the energy of New York. What they really mean is the status ambitions of people of New York. That's the motor in this town. That's what makes it exciting—and it's also what makes it awful many times."
It's the birthday of novelist John Irving, born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1942). He's the author of many best-selling novels, including The World According to Garp (1978), The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989). His most recent novel, The Fourth Hand, came out in 2001. He wasn't a great student in high school, but he was a champion wrestler, and he went to the University of Pittsburgh on a wrestling scholarship. He quit wrestling after his second year there, but he went on to coach wrestling for many years, and many of his characters are wrestlers. After attending college in the Midwest, he moved back East to a converted barn in Vermont. He taught English and coached wrestling at a local college and wrote fiction in his spare time. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, came out in 1969, when he was twenty-six years old.
He published two more novels in the '70s, but they didn't sell well, and he was struggling to find time to write, teach and raise a family at the same time. Then, in 1978, he came out with his big breakthrough, The World According to Garp, about the life of a writer who is the bastard son of a radical feminist. It was so successful that he was able to quit his teaching job and devote almost all of his time to writing. The World According to Garp has sold more than ten million copies and has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Irving has called himself a "nineteenth-century craftsman," and he's been compared to great Victorian writers like Charles Dickens. His novels are long and complex, and full of unusual characters—transsexual football players, unicycling bears, a woman who has her tongue chopped off, a TV reporter whose hand is bitten off by a lion.
Irving said, "Self discipline has been a pleasure for me. I was a terrible student, I had a difficult time with chores and I hated every job I ever had. To make up your own stories for a living is a real piece of cake."
WEDNESDAY, 3 MARCH, 2004
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Poems: "To David, About His Education," by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press).
To David, About His Education
The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind's eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember. Though I don't know
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall
On Plato's Republic, or the calorie content
Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet James Merrill, born in New York City (1926). He grew up in a wealthy family, going to private schools in New York. His father was Charles Merrill, a founder of the stock brokerage Merrill, Lynch & Company, and his mother was a newspaper publisher. His inheritance allowed him to devote all of his attention to poetry as an adult. He once said he was "as American as lemon chiffon pie." His collections include Late Settings (1985) and Divine Comedies, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
It's the birthday of crime writer Nicolas Freeling, born in London (1927). He's known for his detective novels such as Because of the Cats (1963), The King of the Rainy Country (1966) and The Janeites (2002). He grew up in France, and he decided that he wanted to become a chef in a ritzy hotel. He served as an apprentice at one of the most expensive hotels in France, and went on to become head chef of an old Victorian hotel in Belleplage. He eventually got tired of living such a sheltered life, and began wandering around Europe. He had thought about trying to be a writer for a long time, but he didn't actually start writing until, one day, he was thrown in jail for stealing hotel food. He had nothing else to do in prison, so he started writing a novel. In 1962, it was published as Love in Amsterdam, featuring the Dutch detective Piet van der Valk, an idiosyncratic policeman who always finds time during his cases to enjoy gourmet meals.
Freeling said, "Fiction should be written to entertain; for the enjoyment of a casual, uncommitted reader."
It's the birthday of poet Edmund Waller, born in Coleshill, Hertfordshire, England (1606). He was born into a wealthy family and spent most of his life in the British Parliament. In 1643, he led a conspiracy to get rid of rebels in the Parliament and secure London for the King. He was eventually caught and brought before Parliament, and he would have been executed if he hadn't given a dazzling speech pleading for his life. He went into exile in Switzerland and then Italy, and it was there that his first book of poems was published.
It's the birthday of poet and nature writer Edward Thomas, born in London (1878). When he was fifteen years old, he started writing about his walks in the English countryside, and he published his first collection of nature essays when he was eighteen. He wrote several more books of prose in the next ten years. Then, in 1913, he met the American poet Robert Frost after writing a favorable review of Frost's first collection. Frost convinced Thomas to start writing poetry, and by the time he died two years later he had written more than 140 poems, published in 1920 in his Collected Poems.
It's the birthday of the host of the radio show This American Life, Ira Glass, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1959). After his freshman year of college he was looking for a summer job in television or advertising, and someone suggested that he try to be an intern for National Public Radio. He had never even listened to public radio at the time, but he applied for the job and got it, and he's been working in public radio ever since. He started out as a tape cutter, and then he was a desk assistant, a newscast writer, an editor, a producer, a reporter and a substitute host.
In 1989, he moved to Chicago and produced documentaries for the local public radio station. He and a friend started a live show called The Wild Room that included music, stories, and commentary, and outtakes from his own documentaries. In 1995, he came up with the idea for a show called "Your Radio Playhouse" that would tell a series of stories each week, centered on a certain aspect of everyday life in America. That show became This American Life, which has become one of the most popular radio programs in the country. There have been shows on superpowers, babysitting, Frank Sinatra, guns, and monogamy, among many other themes.
THURSDAY, 4 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Water," by Robert Lowell, from Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Water
It was a Maine lobster town--
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,
and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,
and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.
Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,
but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.
The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.
One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.
We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this day in 1952, Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher, telling him that he'd finished his latest novel, The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway's previous novel, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), had gotten horrible reviews, and people were starting to think he was washed up. He was working on a huge novel that he called The Sea Book, and The Old Man and the Sea was originally written as an epilogue to the novel, but he thought it was good enough to publish by itself. In the letter to his publisher, Wallace Meyer, Hemingway wrote, "I know that it is the best I can write ever, for all of my life I think. . . . [It's] an epilogue to all my writing and what I have learned, or tried to learn, while writing and trying to live."
The Old Man and the Sea was published in a single edition of Life magazine, which sold over five million copies. It was also published as a book, which stayed at the top of the bestseller list for six months. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and it was a big reason that Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
It begins: "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. . . . It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat."
It's the birthday of crime novelist James Ellroy, born in Los Angeles (1948). He's best known for four novels about the Los Angeles crime scene in the 1940s and '50s, known as the "L.A. Quartet"—The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992). He grew up in Los Angeles, and his mother was murdered when he was ten years old. He has said that it was then that he began to think of Los Angeles as two separate cities—the glitzy "Outer L.A." that everyone sees, and a seamier "Secret L.A.", full of crime and violence and corruption. He started reading crime novels by authors like Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and when he couldn't afford to buy any more, he would shoplift them. He got kicked out of school when he was seventeen, and fell into drug addiction and alcoholism. He lived on the street for years, stealing food from stores and sleeping in dumpsters. He continued to shoplift books, and at one point had a collection of more than two hundred crime novels.
In 1975, after going to the hospital for brain and lung problems, he decided to give up drugs and alcohol and begin writing. He got a job as a caddy at a fancy country club, and three years later he started writing a novel about country club caddies, a private investigator, and an alcoholic who is obsessed with 1940s Los Angeles. The novel became Brown's Requiem, which was published in 1981.
Ellroy began his "L.A. Quartet" series in 1987, with the publication of Black Dahlia, about the famous 1947 unresolved murder of a mysterious Los Angeles woman who liked to wear black dresses. The third novel in the series, L.A. Confidential, was made into a hugely successful movie in 1997.
FRIDAY, 5 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "At the Airport," by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press).
At the Airport
Through the gate, where nowhere and night begin,
A hundred suddenly appear and lose
Themselves in the hot and crowded waiting room.
A hundred other herd up toward the gate,
Patiently waiting that the way be opened
To nowhere and night, while a voice recites
The intermittent litany of numbers
And the holy names of distant destinations.
None going out can be certain of getting there.
None getting there can be certain of being loved
Enough. But they are sealed in the silver tube
And lifted up to be fed and cosseted,
While their upholstered cell of warmth and light
Shatters the darkness, neither here nor there.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1933 that the Nazi Party won the majority of the seats in the German parliament, known as the Reichstag, effectively taking control of the country. It was the last free election in Germany the end of World War II. Adolf Hitler had secured the chancellorship after the November 1932 elections, but he still didn't have a majority in the Reichstag, so he set March 5, 1933 as the date for new elections. Six days before the election, the Reichstag building caught fire, and the Nazis used the fire as a symbol of the chaos that they would help correct, though some historians believe that the Nazis set the fire themselves. After the election, Hitler passed a law that gave him absolute power over the country.
Just five days after the election, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of romantic languages living in Germany, wrote in his diary: "What, up to election Sunday on March 5, I called terror, was a mild prelude. . . . It's astounding how easily everything collapses. . . . Since [the election,] day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc. . . . A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the earth. . . . No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid.”
On this day in 1953, one of the most ruthless dictators of the twentieth century, Josef Stalin, died in Moscow. The leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until 1953, Stalin was responsible for the death and imprisonment of millions of his citizens during his many political purges. Near the end of his life, his behavior grew more and more bizarre. He held nightly banquets, requiring that his guests drink excessively, because he believed that drunk men didn't tell lies. After the banquets were over he would go to his garden with pruning sheers and chop off the heads of flowers, which his guards would pick up in the morning. He looked over lists of his government officials and put question marks next to the names of those he planned to execute. He began to cook up a conspiracy theory about a terrorist group of Jewish doctors who were planning to poison members of the government, and he put his own doctor on the list of conspirators. He filled the jails with men to be put on trial.
Then, on March 1, he was found unconscious on the floor of his room. According to Nikita Khrushchev, his guards were too terrified to do anything when they found him, because it had been so long since they'd acted without his orders. They left him lying on his floor for thirteen hours. When the doctors finally arrived, they were trembling with fear at the thought of doing something wrong. The doctor who removed his false teeth was shaking so much he dropped the teeth on the ground. They eventually determined that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage. He died four days later.
It's the birthday of novelist Frank Norris, born in Chicago, Illinois (1870). His father was a wealthy self-made jewelry store owner, and Norris grew up in a luxurious household where his mother read him poetry by Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson. He traveled to Paris when he was seventeen to study drawing, even though he didn't really have any artistic talent. He quickly gave up visual art and became obsessed with Arthurian legend, writing long narrative poems about medieval knights. Under pressure from his father, he enrolled at the University of California so that he could eventually take over the family jewelry business. He felt he was above studying, and spent most of his time at parties with debutants. After his parents divorced, he dropped out of school and moved to the East Coast, where he enrolled at Harvard as a special student.
Norris had been writing a series of gothic short stories, imitating Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but a teacher at Harvard persuaded him to read novels by the French writer Émile Zola. Norris became a disciple of Zola, and began to write fiction in the school of naturalism, which portrayed human beings as irrational animals, driven by instincts. His first important novel was McTeague (1899), about a dentist who loses his job, murders his wife for money, and runs away to Death Valley in California. He spent years trying to get his novel published, struggling to support himself as a journalist. Most editors were disturbed by the novel's realistic descriptions of violence and squalor, but when it finally came out in 1899, it had a big influence on other gritty, realistic writers like Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.
SATURDAY, 6 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Thirtieth Anniversary Report of the Class of '41," by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press).
Thirtieth Anniversary Report of the Class of '41
We who survived the war and took to wife
And sired the kids and made the decent living,
And piecemeal furnished forth the finished life
Not by grand theft so much as petty thieving--
Who had the routine middle-aged affair
And made our beds and had to lie in them
This way or that because the beds were there,
And turned our bile and choler in for phlegm--
Who saw grandparents, parents, to the vault
And wives and selves grow wrinkled, grey and fat
And children through their acne and revolt
And told the analyst about all that--
Are done with it. What is there to discuss?
There's nothing left for us to say of us.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, born Elizabeth Barrett near Durham, England (1806). In January of 1845, she received a telegram from a little known poet named Robert Browning. He wrote to her, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett . . . and I love you too." The two began a correspondence, but they had to keep their relationship secret from her father, who had forbidden her to marry. They met in secret several times in the summer of 1845, and they secretly married on September 12, 1846. Elizabeth continued to live with her father for a week after her marriage, and then, with the help of her maid, she ran away with Robert to Italy. She wrote a series of love poems about their courtship, but since she expressed her love so frankly in the poems, she decided to publish them as though they were translations, and the collection was called Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). They were some of the first love poems in English written from a woman's point of view, and they are the poems we remember her for today, including the sonnet that begins, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
It's the birthday of humorist and short story writer Ring Lardner, born in Niles, Michigan (1885). He came from a wealthy family, but his father lost most of his fortune when Lardner was a senior in high school. He tried to get a degree in mechanical engineering, but he dropped out after less than a semester. He started working as a sports writer for a variety of papers, and eventually got a column in the Chicago Tribune, covering the Cubs and the White Sox. At the time, sports writing was more diverse, and Lardner filled his column with profiles of athletes, poems about baseball, parodies of sports articles, and short works of fiction about the sports industry. He was especially good at reproducing the spoken speech patterns of players and coaches.
He got the idea of writing a series of fictional letters from the point of view of a semi-literate rookie baseball player, and in 1914 it was published in the Saturday Evening Post as "A Busher's Letters Home." He later published an expanded version of the letters in his first book, You Know Me Al (1916), and it was a big success. Some critics called his work satire, but he said, “[I don’t know] where they get that stuff about me being a satirist. . . . I just listen."
It's the birthday of novelist Gabriel García Márquez, born in Aracataca, Columbia (1928). He's the oldest of eleven children, and he lived with his grandparents for the first eight years of his life. He said, "I grew up in a village hidden away among marshes and virgin forest on the Colombian north coast . . . a place where the sea passes through every imaginable shade of blue, where cyclones make houses fly away, where villages lie buried under dust and the air burns your lungs." As a child, he loved listening to his grandfather's stories about the recent civil war and his grandmother's stories about ghosts, omens, premonitions, and dead ancestors.
He went to boarding school in Bogotá after his grandfather's death, and he tried to study law, but in 1948, a prominent Liberal Party politician was assassinated, and the event triggered a civil war that lasted for more than ten years. García Márquez stayed in the city to write about the violence, but a riot in his neighborhood started a fire that burned down his house, and all his manuscripts were destroyed. With almost no money, and only two changes of clothes, he moved into a tiny room in a four-story brothel called "the Skyscraper." He began supporting himself as a journalist, writing a series of newspaper stories about tall tales and superstitions in local villages. He met other writers in the cafés and bookstores, and he began to read the authors that would influence his fiction, including Joyce, Faulkner, and Kafka.
He knew he wanted to write fiction, but he wasn't sure what to write about. Then in 1950, he was sitting in his favorite café when a woman came in and told him that she was his mother. He hadn't seen her in a long time, and barely recognized her. She told him that his grandparents' house was up for sale, and she wanted him to travel back to his hometown to help her sell it. He and his mother traveled to his hometown by boat. On the journey, she told him that she was ashamed he had given up his law studies, and that he was living like a beggar in a brothel. She begged him to promise that he would go back to law school as soon as they sold his grandparents' house. He began to wish he'd never agreed to travel with her. Before dawn on the morning they approached their destination, he walked out on the prow of the ship to get a breath of fresh air. He said, "From the windows at the prow . . . the lights of the fishing boats floated like stars in the water. . . . The invisible fishermen conversed . . . [and] their voices had a phantasmal resonance within the boundaries of the swamp. As I leaned on the railing, trying to guess at the outline of the sierra, nostalgia's first blow caught me by surprise." For the rest of the trip he was flooded with memories of his childhood and the stories told to him by his grandparents. A fictional town began to take shape in his mind, based on his memories, and he knew he had to write a novel about that town. He wrote five novels in the next fifteen years, but he wasn't satisfied with any of them.
In January of 1965, he was driving from Mexico City to his home in Acapulco when the entire first chapter of a novel came into his head. He began writing as soon as he got to his house, and worked on nothing else for the next 18 months. When he finished, he was twelve-thousand dollars in debt, and he had to sell his wife's hairdryer in order to pay the postage to send the manuscript to his editor. That novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), about several generations of a family in the fictional village of Macondo. It begins, "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
One Hundred Years of Solitude is now considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and has gone on to write many more books, including Love in the Time of Cholera (1988) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). His most recent book is Living to Tell the Tale (2002), the first volume of his autobiography.
SUNDAY, 7 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost, from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt and Co.).
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of literary critic and James Joyce scholar William York Tindall, born in Williamstown, Vermont (1903). He studied literature at Columbia University and soon after graduation he traveled to Europe. He had heard about the notorious book Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, and he decided to buy a copy when he was in Paris. He said, "I went straight to Luxembourg Gardens and read the final chapters, and discovered that it wasn't a dirty book but a fascinating one." He also realized that by pure coincidence, he had purchased the book on June 16, which is the day on which the action takes place. He became obsessed with Joyce, and read all of his works. When he returned to the U.S. he started teaching a course in modern literature at New York University, and he was one of the first professors in the United States to assign Ulysses to his students. The book was still banned in the U.S. at the time, so his students had to read a bootlegged copy that was chained to a desk in the library. He went on to become president of the James Joyce Society, and he wrote four books about Joyce, including A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (1959) and A Reader's Guide to Finnegan's Wake (1969).
It's the birthday of novelist Robert Harris, born in Nottingham, England (1957). In 1987, he was working as an investigative journalist when he decided to take a vacation in Italy. He was lying on the beach, listening to the German tourists talking all around him, when he suddenly imagined that he was living in the victorious German empire. He got up and went swimming in the ocean, and by the time he came back to shore, he had an outline for a novel about what the world would be like if the Nazis had won World War II. That novel was Fatherland (1991), and it became an international bestseller. It takes place in an alternate 1964 as Germans are preparing to celebrate Hitler's seventy-fifth birthday, and it focuses on an S.S. investigator who stumbles upon suppressed evidence of the extermination of the Jewish people. Harris is also the author of Enigma (1995), about British code breakers during World War II, and Archangel (1998), about the search for a secret Stalin diary. His most recent book is Pompeii (2003), a historical novel about the Roman city buried by Mount Vesuvius.
Harris said, "It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else."
It's the birthday of fiction and nature writer Rick Bass, born in Fort Worth, Texas (1958). His father was an oil geologist, and Rick spent much of his childhood exploring the Texas hill country on deer hunting trips with his grandfather. He studied geology in college and started working for an oil company in Mississippi, but he found himself thinking a lot about his childhood and those deer hunting trips. He started writing short essays on his lunch breaks at work, and those essays became his first book, The Deer Pasture (1985). Around the same time, he began writing short stories, and though he got a lot of rejections, he also got a lot of feedback from editors. He said, "It was like going to school through the mail. I'd focus for a week or two on one mysterious little line. 'Lacks depth', for instance." Then, one day, he read the novel Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison, and he later said, "It threw a mental switch, a big door just swung open." The next story he wrote was published in the Paris Review.
He continued working as a geologist, prospecting for oil, and he wrote a book about his job called Oil Notes (1988). But he and his girlfriend eventually decided that they wanted to get away from civilization, so they packed all their possessions into a pickup truck and drove to Montana. He said, "[We were looking for] a place of ultimate wildness, with the first yardstick of privacy: a place where you could walk around naked if you wanted to." They wound up in the Yaak Valley, and he published a memoir of his first winter there called Winter: Notes from Montana (1991). He wrote, "I can picture getting so addicted to this valley, so dependent on it for my peace, that I become hostage to it."
He's gone on to write many books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novel is The Hermit's Story (2002).
It's the birthday of novelist Bret Easton Ellis, born in Los Angeles, California (1964). As he began to publish, he became associated with the "Brat Pack" of young, successful novelists of the 1980s. He became the target of protests by the National Organization of Women when he wrote his third novel, American Psycho (1991), about an investment banker named Patrick Bateman, who is obsessed with fashionable clothing, hip restaurants, pop music, and the color of his business card, but who also spends his free time murdering and mutilating men, women and children. Ellis's original publisher dropped the book one month before it was supposed to come out, after the chairman of the publisher decided it was too disturbing. When it was finally published, Ellis received anonymous death threats for having written it. His most recent novel is Glamorama (1999).
It was on this day in 1923 that Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening," was published in the New Republic. He'd written the poem after staying up all night working on a different poem called "New Hampshire" (1923). He said later, "I went outdoors, got out sideways and didn't disturb anybody in the house, and about nine or ten o'clock went back in and wrote ['Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening,'] as if I'd had an hallucination." He said that the first lines of the poem, "Whose woods these are, I think I know, / his house is in the village though," contained everything he knew about how to write.
